pigs were occasional in villages in west- ern Siberia, east of Novosibirsk they be- came more common. Now every village we went through seemed to have big gangs of them. Because the weather was so hot, the pigs had generally been wal- lowing in a mudhole just before they got up to amble wherever we happened to see them ambling. Evidently, the wal- lowing technique of some pigs involved lying with just one side of themselves in the mud. This produced two-tone ani- mals-pigs that were half wet, shiny brown mud, and half pink, relatively un- soiled original pig. The effect was strik- ing-sort of harlequin. The other ani- mals that roamed the villages in groups were geese. When a herd of pigs came face to face with a flock of geese, an un- holy racket of grunting and gabbling would ensue. I wondered if the villagers ever got tired of the noise. Whether chal- lenging pigs or not, the village geese seemed to gabble and yak and hiss non- stop. The pigs grunted and oinked al- most as much, but always at some point the whole herd of pigs would suddenly fall silent, and their megaphone-shaped ears would go up, and for half a minute every pig would listen. Birthplace of V olodya-About a half- day past Novosibirsk, we passed close by a town called Yashkino. Seeing it on our road map, V olodya remarked that he had been born there. His mother's people were originally from this area, he said. His father, a tank officer who had been stationed in the Far East at the end of the war, had met his mother while crossing Siberia on his way back to western Rus- sia. V olodya was still a baby when he and his parents left Yashkino, so he had no memory of it; no relatives he knew of still lived there. He felt no need to go there. Cottage Cheese-Called tvorog in Russian, this was a favorite lunch of Volodyàs and Sergeïs. Usually it could be obtained in very fresh supply from the grannies along the road. Sergei and V olodya especially liked their tvorog drenched in smetana ("sour cream"). I got to like it that way, too. Once or twice, we had tvorog so smetanoi not only for lunch but for a snack later in the day. The only drawback to this diet was that it made us smell like babies. And as we were able to bathe only infrequently our basic aroma became that of grownup, dusty, sweaty babies: the summertime smell of Mon- gols, in other words. T alk Radio-There is talk radio in Russia just as in America, and call-in radio shows, and "shock jocK' hosts who say oudandish things. Sergei and V olodya enjoyed listening to these shows some- times. Usually I understood nothing that was said on the radio, except for one time when the host told a joke that Sergei and V olodya both laughed at. I picked out the word "Amerikantsi," so I knew the joke 2A..bL ----------- "Seriously, dude, can we put the air guitar aside while we're lurking?" was about Americans. I asked them to tell me the joke, but they wouldn't. I kept bugging them, but Sergei said the joke was not important. Finally, when he was off doing something in the campsite, I asked V olodya about the joke again, and he told it to me. The joke was: ''"Why do American men want to be present when their wives are in childbirth?" Answer: "Because maybe they weren't present dur- . ." lng conceptIon. SMOG U ntil we left Novosibirsk, we had seen none of the large-scale environmen- tal damage that Siberia is famous for. Then we hit the small, smoky city of Kemerovo, in the Kuznetsk Basin coal- mining region. Russians don't bother to hide strip mines with a screen of trees along the road to spare the feelings of motorists, as we Americans do. Beyond Kemerovo, the whole view at times be- came the gaping pits themselves, sprawl- ing downward before us on either side while the thread-thin road tiptoed where it could between. Strip mines are strip mines, and I had seen similar scenery in North Dakota and southern Ohio and West Virginia, though never quite so close at hand. Often through this Siberian coal region the road strayed and forgot its original intention, and more than one fork we took dead-ended without warning at a city-size strip-mine hole. We mean- dered in the Kuznetsk Basin for most of a day and drove until past nightfall in order to camp on the other side. After the Kuznetsk Basin came a long interval of meadows. We saw dark- clothed people working the hay fields in big groups as in an old bucolic painting, or riding to or from the work in horse- drawn flatbed wagons whose hard rubber wheels bouncing on the uneven pave- ment made the flesh of the passengers' faces jiggle fast. In this more peaceful re- gion, we camped one night on the banks of the Chulym River at a popular spot with a gravel bank more convenient for bathing and washing than the usual swampy mud. While we ate supper, a group of Christians waded in not far from us, some of them in flowing white baptismal clothes. The worshippers sang songs accompanied by a guitar, held hands in a circle, swayed. A man in the middle of the circle took another man